Last week we published the design concept for the The Immersery which has now opened to the public as the centrepiece of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. The Immersery is a cloud-like structure suspended above a floating bar and open-kitchen restaurant on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River designed by international design practice HASSELL, from a concept dreamt up by the team at Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. WLA interviewed HASSELL by email about the design and various aspects of the design process.

The typical model of industrial scale power generation in the American west exports the impacts of production to rural landscapes and delivers power to users through transmission lines. Local power generation demands inventive clean sources of energy, visual and environmental sensitivity, and multiple benefits for communities.

The project converted a 1980s office building into a centre offering social and cultural support services for the aboriginal community in downtown Toronto. A green roof was conceived as cultural and ceremonial grounds to charge unused space with vitality; to provide urban aboriginals with access to nature, rituals and customs; and to crown the building with greenery and the sounds of drumming and song to project a healthy aboriginal presence to the city.

The London 2012 Olympic Park is one of the most significant new pieces of urban realm to have been created in living memory. LDA Design in collaboration with Hargreaves Associates has led the design of the Parklands and Public Realm for the entire 102 hectare site and has masterminded its transformation from contaminated industrial land into a 21st century park. The practice has also led the design of its post- Games transformation into a permanent public park. Forming the centre piece of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the 2.5km2 Olympic Park is the largest new urban park in the capital since the Victorian era and is a catalyst for regeneration in East London.

Green infrastructure, including the installation of plants on under-utilised urban surfaces, can provide significant environmental benefits for our cities. These green interventions have the capacity to cool the urban environment, reduce energy consumption, mitigate flooding and increase habitats for biodiversity. They provide an opportunity to evolve the way we develop the built environment, to maximise existing infrastructure and lower the need for costly upgrades.